Baker Academic

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

If you have not yet discovered Jonathan Bernier's new blog "Critical Realism and the New Testament" here is your chance. Jonathan's blog relates his expertise in New Testament studies to his fascination with mathematician, priest, philosopher, and theologian, Bernard Lonergan. In his latest post, he wonders if Plato's cave allegory might give us a better way into the notion of "authenticity" in New Testament studies.

Bernier writes, "Thus we can see that the criteria did not fail because they did not measure up to the task for which they were formulated but because more fundamentally that task did not measure up to intelligence or reason." Against Chris Keith (who has published on this topic more than anyone else), I think that I agree with Bernier on this point. Chris has taken the line first put forward by Morna Hooker: the traditional authenticity criteria were not invented to authenticate historical material. But (and this is my counter point) researchers develop new tools all the time without a full view to their range of application. If we are to criticize the criteria for authenticity, we must do so on two levels: (1) our notion of "authenticity" carries baggage of false assumptions about what historians do with data and facts; (2) the individual criteria - judged each upon their own logic and output - often create more problems than they solve.

Perhaps once Chris has returned from his holiday, we can revisit this topic.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Fortress Press has made Jerry Sumney's excellent introduction to the Bible available in an e-format. I was part of the team that enhanced this edition. It includes:

...the full text of the print textbook PLUS the chapter summaries and primary sources from the print Study Companion, PLUS enhancements that engage students like never before!• Audio and video clips that further explain key concepts• Poptips, links, and callout boxes for deeper learning• Guided tour, slideshow, and hotspot images for visual learners and better understanding • Self-tests that lead students to additional information about questions they answered incorrectly• Social note-taking that optimizes group study and whole-class inquiry and discussion• Full-text search capabilities, bookmarks, highlighting, and note-taking features for discovering, synthesizing, and retaining important information
In addition to being part of this team, I was also the lead author for the study companion. This companion text (available in both print and e-formats) is heavy on excerpts from Ancient Near Eastern texts (both inside and outside the Bible) and questions for discussion/reflection. It is written for beginners.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Below is Dr Chris Tilling's lecture from the 2014 Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity Conference at St Mary's University, Twickenham. It's title is "Paul, Evil, and Justification Debates" and basically Chris takes on the world.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Here is Dr Christopher Skinner's lecture from the 2014 Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity conference here at St Mary's University, Twickenham. It's on the role of evil in the cosmologies of Mark's Gospel and John's Gospel, entitled "Overcoming Satan, Overcoming the World," and opens with a quotation from George the Animal Steele!

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Pete Enns is hosting a very interesting series of blog posts on his blog under the theme of "aha moments," where scholars and non-scholars alike are (or will be) discussing the process that took them away from an overly conservative reading of Scripture. Don't miss the latest installment, from the Jesus Blog's own Dr Anthony Le Donne. It includes such classics as:

"Lust was a big deal when I was an adolescent. For boys of a certain age, lust is a fulltime job."

"Jesus told me that if my right eye continued to sin, I should pluck it out. And here I was looking upon Linda Carter with both eyes!"

"But any way you slice it, Ezra 9-10 is deeply troubling—especially so to folks with an owner’s manual view of the Bible."

"A high view of Scripture—for me at least—is one that views the Bible as much more than an owner’s manual."

This entry in the "aha moments" series shows why it was such a privilege to work alongside Anthony for two years.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Here is Dr Tommy Wasserman's lecture from the 2014 Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity Conference at the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible. Tommy evaluates several instances where issues involving evil and Satan likely prompted scribes to alter the text of the New Testament.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Here is the video of the keynote lecture from our 2014 Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, delivered by Prof Dr Loren Stuckenbruck and entitled "How Much Does the Christ Event Solve?" If you're interested in the relationship between Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, you do not want to miss this. Loren weighs in pretty heavily on recent Pauline scholarship. The question and answer session at the end is also illuminating.

ALD: In your book, you claim that Jesus was “consistently nonviolent.” This
would seem to contradict some passages in the Gospels that suggest otherwise.
You will, no doubt, be accused by some readers of cutting out and dismissing
several passages that are problematic for your thesis by labeling them “inauthentic.”
Have you overextended your thesis by concluding that Jesus was “consistently”
nonviolent?

SJJ: I understand that my proposal of
“thoroughgoing” consistency might be difficult for some to accept, but I find
this ironic for several reasons: first, because we all value (even insist upon)
consistency in our everyday lives – in our friendships, relationships, social
networks, when/where we buy our favorite foods, use various products and
services, etc. We all expect and anticipate a certain level of consistency in
these things (otherwise we go elsewhere).On another level, we value
consistency as an ethical good and tend to equate it with integrity,
reliability, and, most of all, trustworthiness. The less consistent people are,
the less we tend to trust them. On an even more pertinent level – when many
conservative Evangelicals approach the Scriptures, they hold a consistent view of Scripture: everything
in Scripture is categorized as “inerrant” because contradictions would
undermine the authority of Scripture. The irony, of course, is that this very
faithfullness to the consistency of
Scripture creates interpretive problems – because the Scriptures do not appear to be consistent but rather
contradictory in many instances. Scriptural inerrancy affirms the necessity of
consistency but must do so by denying inconsistencies. It’s important to point
out that it is the critical detection of these very inconsistencies that has so
often resulted in major theoretical advances in biblical scholarship (e.g., the
Documentary Hypothesis, the Synoptic Problem, redaction criticism, etc.). Often the default position is that Jesus’
inconsistency represents some kind of divine “mystery” and is therefore beyond
investigation or scrutiny. In a different context, the concept of divine
mystery could be affirmed, but in this instance, it is not likely, and highly
problematic. First, the Gospels are human productions, literary products of a
particular time and place that reflect their authors’ attempts to preserve the
inspiring words and deeds of Jesus, and they were as unavoidably influenced by
their own cultural resources, personalities, and interests as we are. Second,
this is essentially a confessional, not a critical position. Criticism means
making choices, decisions, and judgments – and justifying those choices – with
evidence and reason, not presupposing that everything in the text is authentic.
Put simply, I propose that Jesus was
consistent when it comes to the topic of violence. What this means is that he was nonviolent personally,
theologically, and eschatologically – even if the authors of the Gospels were not. This dissonance
between the Jesus of history and the canonical Gospels is axiomatic in critical
biblical scholarship. We shouldn’t shrink from this. In fact, embracing this
dissonance effectively undermines the domestication of Jesus in the Christian
theological tradition and might yet help restore the controversial Jesus that
we still find everywhere on the pages of the Gospels. I am tempted to conclude
that if our research is not controversial,
then we are not doing our jobs
properly.

ALD: Simon, as you may know, I’m a pacifist and a Christian. I also make my
living as a Jesus historian. I would like nothing more than to believe in a
thoroughgoing non-violent messiah. But allow me to push back a bit here. I
imagine that Jesus struggled with the role of violence (be it divine or
otherwise) in the coming of God’s kingdom. I’m also willing to imagine a Jesus
who changed his mind on this topic. Moreover, we have an analog with Malcolm X.
MX seems to have changed his tune on a number of topics toward the end. So I
would take issue with the assumption that a “confessional” rather than a
“critical” position has made me less receptive of a thoroughgoing non-violent
Jesus.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

If you haven't been keeping up with Peter Enns, shame on you! Pete has had yet another brilliant idea. He has asked several biblical scholars to write briefly of an "aha" moment that moved them toward a more sophisticated reading of Scripture. His latest is guest blogger is Christopher Skinner.

These posts are concise and just the right tone for undergraduates. If you're teaching an introduction to the Bible or hermeneutics class, you might consider a few of the above as required reading. You can look for my post in this series soon.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Some of the lectures from the 2014 Evil Conference of the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible are becoming available on YouTube. I'll feature some here, starting with this great lecture from Dr. Christopher Rollston from George Washington University on "The Rise of the Satan in Early Second Temple Judaism." As a teaser, Dr. Rollston suggests here that the Accuser's role in the book of Job should be read much more positively than has typically occurred.

I recently had the
great pleasure to read The
Nonviolent Messiah: Jesus, Q, and the Enochic Tradition ​by Simon Joseph. As I say in my back-cover
blurb for this book, it is the finest book to date on the topic of Jesus and
non-violence. In hope that I can help this book get the reception it deserves,
I approached the folks at Fortress Press about interviewing Simon.

ALD: Simon, you have a
wide range of interests including early Christianity, the Dead Sea Scrolls,
modern religious practices, and film production. What made this topic
particularly interesting to you? How did it come about?

SJJ: I did my doctoral work on Q at
Claremont Graduate University and after I published my dissertation – Jesus, Q, and the Dead Sea Scrolls – I
knew that my next major project would focus on the relationship between Q and
the historical Jesus. In 2011, I published an article in New Testament Studies that examined the question of why Q does not
use the term Christos or messiah. At
the time, I was working on a number of sayings in Q’s “Inaugural Sermon”
(Q/Luke 6:20-49) that highlight a very radical orientation of nonviolence. I
thought it would be interesting to see if there was some kind of connection
between the absence of traditional Davidic messianism (which tends to be
represented in terms of military violence) in Q and alternative, perhaps even
nonviolent messianic ideas. There were, after all, many prospective messiahs in Second Temple Judaism,
corresponding to a rich variety of Judaisms
at that time.

ALD: What’s the central
thesis of The Nonviolent Messiah? Why
is it important?

SJJ: The central thesis of this book
is that Jesus’ nonviolence is not taken seriously enough in New Testament studies
or Jesus Research. While it is at times acknowledged, and at times even
presupposed, its implications – if
historical – have not been fully registered or integrated with other aspects of
the Jesus tradition. After publishing a number of articles on various aspects
of Jewish messianism and Christology, this thesis really developed when I began
noticing more conversations about religion and violence taking place in the
mainstream media. I was intrigued by the idea of linking the problem of
violence with traditonal ideas about Jewish messianism and Jesus’ identity as a
messianic figure in a way I hadn’t seen done before. I knew that many people
are troubled by some of the violence contained in the Old Testament/Hebrew
Bible and that Christians have, through the ages, introduced a number of
different ways of dealing with these texts, but I also knew that I would have
to challenge the simplistic dichotomy of a violent OT God vs. a loving NT God.
After all, there is more than enough violence in both Testaments to go around!
My goal with this book is to encourage the critical discussion of violence in
the biblical tradition and urge others to take Jesus’ distinctive nonviolence
more seriously. I realize that not everyone will agree with my assessment of
the data, but at least the stakes of the debate might be made clearer as I
think the consequences of not resolving this particular problem are more
serious than we realize. On the positive side, I think that many biblical
traditions can be understood without appealing to violence as their
interpretive key.

ALD: As you know, I’m very
sympathetic to your conclusions. But I wonder whether you’re alienating many
readers by assuming a hypothetical “Q” source. We conducted a poll on the Jesus
Blog a few months ago and it showed that less than half of our readers are
Q*berts like you and me. How do you see Q functioning in Jesus Research?

SJJ: One of my favorite things about
The Jesus Blog is that it reaches both scholars and many people outside of
academia who are interested in these discussions. I know that a lot of people
are skeptical of Q studies because they think they are either too speculative
or because they think that Q studies tend to undermine traditional ideas about
Jesus and Christian Origins. This is not necessarily the case and I devote a
whole chapter to this problem in my book. So while many of your readers – who
are presumably a mix of academic and non-academic folk – have an opinion that
they don’t believe in Q, I am working within an academic context where the two
Documentary Hypothesis is still the dominant solution to the Synoptic Problem
and I use it as a working hypothesis. Despite ongoing debate on the Synoptic
Problem, Q is a very useful analytical
tool that represents quite well how the Jesus movement actually developed –
literarily, historically, ethnically, geographically, socially, theologically,
and Christologically. This makes it an important site in NT scholarship and
Jesus Research. Of course, the Jesus of Q is not the historical Jesus, so there
are methodological constraints and restrictions that we have to be aware of.
For those interested, John Kloppenborg has written an excellent article on this
(“The Sayings Gospel Q and the Quest of the Historical Jesus,” HTR 89 [1996]: 307-344).

ALD: What is your understanding of Jesus’ relationship to Judaism? Where do
you locate the historical Jesus within Second Temple Judaism?

SJJ: I come to the study of the
historical Jesus as a New Testament scholar and historian with expertise in the
Jewish origins of Christianity. It’s now a truism that Christianity became a
distinctive and identifiable religion only by differentiating itself from
“Judaism,” but our interpretive problem is that Christianity was a part of Judaism when it began, i.e., it was
born within Judaism. Consequently,
any historical (re)construction of Jesus or Christianity first has to account
for this early formative period.
In terms of Jesus’ Jewishness, I think it
should be fairly obvious to all by now that Jesus did not attack “Judaism” or
try to replace it with himself. We have to come to better terms with that. But
I don’t think that Jesus was a “normative” or “orthodox” Jew either – whatever that might even mean in the first
century – because if he was I find it hard to see why he would have been so
offensive to his contemporaries. I tend to think that Jesus was not accused of
“blasphemy” and “leading Israel astray” for nothing. So I think we need to keep
Jesus in that middle position – a Jewish Jesus who offends traditional Jewish
sensitivities.
Furthermore, if we want to take the
historical question of why Jesus was understood to be a Jewish messianic figure
seriously (as opposed to the more theological question of whether he was “The Messiah”), we need to reconstruct
that historical context.
I was fortunate to have begun my graduate
studies when the whole academic scandal about the delayed publication of the
Dead Sea Scrolls was dying down, so I had an opportunity to assess the field
after a lot of heated discussion had already taken place. I became particularly
interested in the Essene movement and I was surprised by how little interest NT
scholars showed in them. With very few exceptions, they are virtually ignored,
and their relevance to the study of Christian Origins is sometimes flatly
denied. I find this to be a major historical oversight. Are the Essenes ignored
because they are nowhere mentioned in the NT or because they do not fit our
social or religious identity constructions of ancient or modern Judaism and
Christianity? My contribution to the historical problem of the messianic
identification of Jesus affirms that Jesus was indeed regarded as messianic by
his Jewish followers, that they absorbed ideas and practices from the larger
Essenic-Enochic movement (only partially accounted for in the Qumran community
and Dead Sea Scrolls), and that their apocalyptic expectations of a new
Adam/messiah were fulfilled in Jesus. In short, what we call “Christianity”
originated as a form of universalistic-apocalyptic Judaism with Jesus as its
central redemptive figure.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

I like airport bookstores. They provide something of a microcosm of popular culture. If you find yourself in this petri dish and your eye is caught by books about Jesus, you will inevitably find a book about the "leadership" of Jesus. You will find these books next to books by Donald Trump and Zig Ziglar. A quick search on amazon yields dozens of such titles. Here are just a few:

Jesus on Leadership

The Leadership Style of Jesus: How to Make a Lasting Impact

The Leadership Principles of Jesus: Modern Parables of Achievement and Motivation

A Life of Impact: Leadership Principles of Jesus

Gospel Driven Leadership: 5 Non-Negotiable, Unchanging, and Eternal Principles for Leading Like

Jesus

I confess that I've never read one. I've looked at a few tables of contents and skimmed a page or two. I have, however, read the Gospels several times over and I can't help but wonder: what would be the market value of this book?

The Leadership Failures of Jesus

Chapter One: Confusing People on Purpose
Chapter Two: Sowing Seeds Haphazardly
Chapter Three: Alienating Your Family in One Simple Step
Chapter Four: Enabling Lazy and Disrespectful People
Chapter Five: The Art of Pissing Off Almost Everybody
Chapter Six: Sabotaging the Longevity of Your Career
Chapter Seven: Scaring the Bejesus out of People in Graveyards

If you haven't yet heard about the newly-launched SBL Bible Odyssey project, do yourself a favor and go to www.bibleodyssey.com. The SBL used a NEH grant to create a massive online reference tool that makes New Testament scholarship quickly accessible for non-specialist readers. There are a ton of entries, all written by scholars. There are also maps and images, etc. It's a tremendous tool for teaching and I plan to have my students use it as a first port of call in their research. I was honored to author this entry on the Pericope Adulterae. Congratulations to the editors and SBL on a job well done.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Happy Canada Day! It is only fitting that today I received an email (from Josh Mann, thx Josh) alerting me to a youtube review of my The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals. The reviewer is Shabir Ally, president of the Islamic Information & Dawah Centre International in Toronto. It is clear that Ally has given my book a close read and has grasped the key elements of my arguments. You can watch the review here:

...a weblog dedicated to historical Jesus research and New Testament studies

__

Search This Blog

_______

Le Donne, Keith, Pitre, Crossley, Jacobi, Rodríguez

James Crossley (PhD, Nottingham) is Professor of Bible, Society, and Politics at St. Mary's University, Twickenham, London. In addition to most things historical Jesus, his interests typically concern Jewish law and the Gospels, the social history of biblical scholarship, and the reception of the Bible in contemporary politics and culture. He is co-executive editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus.

Christine Jacobi studied protestant theology and art history in Berlin and Heidelberg. She is research associate at the chair of exegesis and theology of the New Testament and apocryphal writings. She completed her dissertation at the Humboldt-University of Berlin in 2014. She is the author of Jesusüberlieferung bei Paulus? Analogien zwischen den echten Paulusbriefen und den synoptischen Evangelien (BZNW 213), Berlin: de Gruyter 2015. Christine Jacobi is a member of the „August-Boeckh-Antikezentrum“ and the „Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostische Schriften“.

Chris Keith (PhD, Edinburgh) is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and Director of the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.

Anthony Le Donne (PhD, Durham) is Associate Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary. He is the author/editor of seven books. He is the co-founder of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts Consultation and the co-executive editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus.

Brant Pitre (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is Professor of Sacred Scripture at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. Among other works, he is the author of Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile (Mohr-Siebeck/Baker Academic, 2005), and Jesus and the Last Supper (Eerdmans, 2015). He is particularly interested in the relationship between Jesus, Second Temple Judaism, and Christian origins.

Rafael Rodríguez (PhD, Sheffield) is Professor of New Testament at Johnson University. He has published a number of books and essays on social memory theory, oral tradition, the Jesus tradition, and the historical Jesus, as well as on Paul and Pauline tradition. He also serves as co-chair of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Books by the Jesus Bloggers

To purchase, follow these links

___

Jesus and the Last Supper

_____

Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text